percentage
Americannoun
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percentages
plural
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a rate or proportion per hundred.
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an allowance, commission, or rate of interest calculated by percent.
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a proportion in general.
Only a small percentage of the class will graduate with honors.
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gain; benefit; profit; advantage.
noun
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proportion or rate per hundred parts
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commerce the interest, tax, commission, or allowance on a hundred items
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any proportion in relation to the whole
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informal profit or advantage
Usage
What is a percentage? Percentage is a rate or proportion per hundred, as in This graph shows the percentage of homes that have a microwave. Percentage is also used more generally to mean any proportion, as in Studies have shown that a large percentage of people love cute animals. A percent is one one-hundredth (1/100) of something. Percentage refers to the rate or proportion of that one hundred. Usually, you will see the word percentage used in math equations or statistics or when someone is measuring the increase and decrease in rates. Informally, percentage can mean a gain or advantage, as in There is no percentage to be gained from lying to the sheriff. Generally, percentage and percent can be used interchangeably when referring to vague proportions. However, the word percentage never follows an exact number. In this case, only percent can be used in The number of pet owners increased by 10 percent. A percentile is any of the possible 100 equal parts a range of values can be divided into. A given percentile means that the percentage of all possible outcomes is lower or lesser than the given percentile. For example, if you score in the 92nd percentile of an exam, you scored higher than 92 percent of all other people who took the exam. Example: After careful measuring, the percentage of people who hated pineapple on pizza was found to be significantly higher than first thought.
Commonly Confused
See percent.
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Etymology
Origin of percentage
Explanation
A percentage is a portion of a whole expressed as a number between 0 and 100 rather than as a fraction. All of something is 100 percent, half of it is fifty percent, none of something is zero percent. To determine a percentage, you divide the portion of the whole by the whole itself and multiply by 100. So if you just ate two pieces of an eight-piece pie, and you want to know what percentage of the pie you consumed, you'd first divide 2 by 8 which equals .25. Then multiply .25 times 100 and get 25 percent. A percentage can also mean a portion of something but only when it has to do with numbers. When you buy furniture, the salesman gets a percentage of what you spend.
Vocabulary lists containing percentage
The SAT: Language of the Test, List 3
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Perfect Ten: Dec, Cent, Mille
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The New SAT: The Language of the Test
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
Statistics Jersey said this quarter the island's headline inflation rate was 0.6 percentage points lower than the UK's CPIH, a measure of inflation that includes housing costs, which stood at 3.6%.
From BBC ● Oct. 23, 2026
The sale is expected to represent an additional uplift of low- to mid-single-digit percentage points to revenue and adjusted Ebitda, it added.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 22, 2026
Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz said this month that it had knocked "at least one percentage point" off GDP this year.
From Barron's ● Oct. 22, 2026
That category extends beyond generative AI, so the percentage should not be mistaken for a precise measure of AI exposure.
From MarketWatch ● Oct. 22, 2026
And I would say the percentage of students who will end up making it from your class is probably fifty percent.
From "Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago" by LeAlan Jones
The on-base percentages, compared: .363 for the Brewers, .263 for the Dodgers.
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 13, 2026
Trade policy tends to arrive in public dressed in abstraction: percentages, agreements, investigations, duties, markets.
From Salon ● Oct. 7, 2026
To get annual figures, Bending Spoons said it averaged four quarterly percentages, a method that can smooth out big swings in churn, rather than dividing one full-year revenue number by another.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 11, 2026
Likewise, double-check that percentages across all named beneficiaries add up to 100%, a common source of errors.
From MarketWatch ● Sep. 10, 2026
Search after search about lung transplants and lung-function percentages, new combinations and phrasing but always the same idea.
From "Five Feet Apart" by Rachael Lippincott
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